'My darling—my darling! Be true to me; the day when I cease to believe in you will kill me—you are such a child—you know so little of the world, sweet one!'
'So little of the world—a child!' thought he. 'What an ass I was! I am not killed by it, and she has been false as the devil. How came I to say things that seemed so prophetic?'
Thus, as he thought over all the love and blind adoration he had lavished on her, he felt only rage and sickness at his own folly. He saw it all now, when it was too late—too late!
What human heart has not learned the bitterness of these two bitter words, in many ways, through life?
Yet, tantalizingly, she would come before him in dreams, and thus recall him to the words of an old sonnet—
'Half pleading and half petulant she stands;
Her golden hair falls rippling on my hands;
Her words are whispered in their old sweet tone.
But neither word nor smile can move me now—
There is an unseen shadow on her brow.
I cannot love, because all trust is gone!'
It was a very awkward subject for Hester to approach, yet, seeing him so moody, so silent and trist, when first again he came to Merlwood, she said to him timidly and softly:
'Forget the past, Roland. She made no real impression on your heart, but affected your imagination only.'
And now he began to think that such was indeed the case; while to Maude it seemed strange indeed that Annot Drummond should be at Earlshaugh, posing as the future mistress thereof, while she and her disinherited brother were a species of outcasts therefrom.
Earlshaugh—the old house of so many family traditions and memories—was very dear to Maude in spite of all the dark and mortifying hours she had lately spent under its roof. What races and frolics and fun had gone on there in the past time, when she, her brothers, and Hester Maule were all happy children, in the long corridors and ghostly old attics, under the steep roofs and pointed turrets where the antique vanes creaked in the wind; and how greater seemed their fun when the rain storms of winter or spring came rattling down on the old stone slates, and they all nestled together under the slope, with a sense of protection and power unknown in future years—so the girl's heart clung to the old roof-tree with a love that nothing in the future could destroy.